Bloggered - Blogger.com - the

Bloggered - Blogger.com - the site I use to publish this blog - has been hinky again. Hopefully this post will go live eventually...

Deja Vu? - Rachel Lucas makes an interesting point:

I was thinking of something the other day, regarding the French. Don't correct me if I'm wrong, because this is just a vague idea, but it seems to me that the Iraqi people of today are like the French from 1940-1944. Held prisoner by a hated leader, etc. And yes, I am fully aware that the situations are different in some key ways (Saddam is not a foreigner who invaded and occupied Iraq and most of the rest of the neighborhood), but if anyone out there can prove to me that the Iraqi people are less miserable/oppressed/abused than the French were under the Nazis, I'll be impressed.

So I was just thinking, what if Britain and the United States had viewed the Nazi occupation of France in the early 1940s the same way the French view the current situation in Iraq? What if we'd insisted on diplomacy rather than defeating Hitler and his regime? What if we'd passed some resolutions, ordered "inspectors" into France to see if Hitler was lying about...whatever, passed some more resolutions, run away sheepishly when Hitler kicked us out of France, sat around for a few years, and then passed some more resolutions and held "talks"?

What if, 12 years and 17 resolutions into this fiasco (around 1952), some countries like, say, Australia and Switzerland wanted us to help them (or even just allow them) to bust into France to liberate the people and oust Hitler from power, but the United States and Britain insisted they not do so, because we just hadn't had enough diplomacy yet? And that gosh, we wouldn't want to make all the Nazis mad at us because it might create more little Hitlers?

Of course, what Rachel misses is that there was such an opposition in the US; they figured we had no business intervening in a foreign country like that. Some even thought Hitler wasn't all that bad!

Of course, unlike today, that crowd was basically regarded as a pack of nutbars, rather than in control of the media and Hollywood.

The Air Out There - An email correspondent wrote about my Friday post about the weather:

...you made some comment about going outside to enjoy the weather.

Then, this AM as I am up writing my Sunday School lesson, I see the Star Tribune is telling us that the MPCA is saying: "Hey, it might be nice but don't be out there too long, it's polluted air people. Too much exhaust from vehicles (like SUV's) and power plants (hey, what are you using energy for anyway) and fireplaces and other fine things that all you people need and use."

Something stinks, Mitch. The nicest day in the last 120 days or something, and we have to wear our 3M dust filter masks when we go outside for the first time without our Eddie Bauer Sub-Antarctic Polar Fleece Down Lined Thermalite Flannel Snowsuit?

I think it was Nietzche who said "If a crappy day didn't exist, mankind would have to create one".

Posted by Mitch at March 17, 2003 07:00 AM